Anthropology 1020E Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Second Voyage Of Hms Beagle, Georges Cuvier, Uniformitarianism
2 Dec 2014
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Today: science as a way of knowing, history of evolutionary thought. The anthropological perspective: key themes, comparative, evolutionary, holistic. Mutual interactive evolution of human biology and culture. Anthrpology and/of science: practice scientific methodology, laboratories, excavations, ethnographic fieldwork, science as a way of producing knowledge, iq tests, intelligence and race. The traditional notion of science is that it is objective": humans cannot be totally objective, bias, expectations, politics, worldviews, science is coloured by subjectivity", must declare one"s biases up front, be transparent about how have worked to overcome. Western worldviews on nature: middle ages in europe, fixity of species, antiquity of earth, great chain of being. James ussher (1581-1656: religious man, investigator of human origins. Theory that the earth was not created very long ago. Sense of hierarchy in nature humans are at the top (thought angels are above humans: very precise estimate about when the earth was formed.
